the ballad of john and yoko

A week after Linda Louise Eastman (*1941 – †1998) married Paul McCartney, John Lennon (*1940 - †1980) and Yoko Ono had their wedding service in Gibraltar on this day in 1969, traveling to Amsterdam five days later for their honeymoon.
Knowing that their marriage would be a big press event, the couple decided—at the height of the Vietnam War—to put the media attention to good use and staged the first of their weeklong Bed-Ins for Peace. An international contingent of journalists were invited into their bedroom in the presidential suite of the Hilton Hotel daily from nine o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night. Afterwards they dashed off to Vienna, sending acorns to heads of state around the world in hopes that they would plant them and rear oaks as symbols of peace.

silent majority

Echoing the 1919 turn of phrase employed by Warren G Harding during his campaign in the aftermath of World War I that was meant as a euphemism to distinguish the quick from the dead (with those who’ve passed then and now far outnumbering the living and by extension more moral weight like all future generations), Richard Milhous Nixon popularised the appeal to the quiet in a speech on this day in 1969:
“And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” Assuming that those who were not actively protesting Nixon’s policies, joining the counter-culture and rallying against the Vietnam War were in fact an overshadowed demographic and gave Nixon their tacit approval. Casting this idealised demographic against a “vocal minority” was a strategy of divide-and-conquer and the “disenfranchised” were not the precarious, forgotten or downtrodden but rather the comfortable who aspired for more and were menaced by those that had less. It was effective.  This demographic of Middle America (though now more international in its application) has gone through many incarnations since—from the Angry White Male to the Soccer Mom, Loggers, Coal Miners and many other labels before returning to its original form. If one does not speak up, it becomes much easier for others to speak for you.

october surprise

We’re all probably too fatigued already to weather another political bombshell and while the term was informed during the previous US election-cycle and came into common-parlance during the following presidential run-off between Richard Nixon and George McGovern, on this day fifty years ago (1968) President Lyndon Johnson announced probably the first non-spontaneous, last-minute policy shift by ordering cessation of all bombardment in North Vietnam.
Johnson cited progress in the Paris peace negotiations as his motivation but his opponents accused him of making a desperate overture to voters and as a sort of retribution for a series of unfortunate coincidences that tarnished his campaign in 1964 and nearly cost him the election: the unexpected retirement of Nikita Khrushchev, a gay sex scandal of one of Johnson’s top aides, a successful nuclear missile test in China and Labour taking control of the UK. The Vietnam October Surprise failed, however, to carry Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, to victory and the Nixon administration continued hostilities. Ironically, the subsequent October Surprise in 1972 that helped the incumbent hold office and defeat Barry Goldwater was a promise delivered by Henry Kissinger that “peace was at hand” and that ground forces were to be withdrawn from Vietnam in the following year.

an unlikely weapon

Fifty years ago today, combat photographer and journalist for the Associated Press Eddie Adams whilst on an extended assignment to cover the Vietnam War was in Saigon at the exact moment to capture the summary execution of Vietcong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnam’s national police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan.
The widely circulated and iconic image coincided with the start of the Tết Offensive and caused many Americans to question whom their allies were in this battle and their motivations for being in it in the first place and was the impetus for burgeoning protests. Though winning a Pulitzer prize for the picture the following year, Adams did have misgivings and wondered if the brutal act was not done to play to the press and reflected on the impact the photograph had had on its subjects’ lives and was far prouder of his later work with refugees that persuaded President Jimmy Carter to grant asylum to two hundred thousand boat people. Adams’ corpus of work is archived by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

spanish armada or tonkin ghosts

The story of America’s other non-contiguous state is also a fascinating one and how it came to be is impacted not just by time and tide (and volcanic eruptions) or even just simple avarice (as I assumed).  Neither was Manifest Destiny a universally accepted doctrine of the expanding Republic.  It is true that the Kingdom of Hawai’i was ultimately annexed by the United States due in part by agitators who owned plantations and backed supporters in the overthrow of the royal family.  The seated US government, however, under the leadership of anti-imperialists, was exonerated of any interference, both in unseating the monarchy or encouraging the new democracy (a very short-lived republic) to make the transition to accession as an American territory.   The timing of events during the late 1800s and culminating in 1903 were the ripples broadcast of a larger stratagem for America to assert its strength as a world power.  The interest and acquisition of the Pacific island group began with the Spanish-American War, a forgotten and long-distant conflict itself but responsible for many of these geological artefacts and discontinuities.  Prior to the US Civil War, successive regimes in the US were interested in obtaining Cuba, a colony of Spain, for its farmlands and to enslave its native population—rather than importing slaves from Africa.  Spain refused to sell to America at any price and America’s own intervening civil war put a halt to ambitions of empire for several years.

 After the Civil War ended, however, the idea for conquest was renewed, enervated in part by nascent revolts in Cuba towards Spanish rule, which had been going on for years.  America saw the chance to feed the unrest, aided by the yellow-journalism, sensational and negative press by reporters Pulitzer and Hearst (whose names now seem to epitomise just the opposite quality in reporting).  The mysterious sinking of an American battleship in Havana harbour pushed the American president, William McKinley, reluctant for war and with no interest in colony building until and unless America could solve her existing domestic problems, into all-out war with Spain.  Perhaps part of the American public’s appetite for war was paradoxically just emerging itself from a horrendous and prolonged conflict and wanted to unite in one cause—though not a very just or honourable one, and perhaps a cause also picked by munitions-manufacturers.  The theatre quickly spread from the Caribbean to Spain’s colonies in the Pacific, and after ten weeks, the crippled Spanish navy demanded peace be brokered.  The Treaty of Paris awarded the US all Spanish colonies outside those in Africa—sort of a pyric victory, though, as the engagement brought waves of epidemic illnesses back to the US and introduced the country to the concept of crusading, which it tried very hard to avoid and has never been able to shake since.  Independence was eventually given to Cuba (with the lease in perpetuity of fort in Guantánamo Bay), Panama and the Philippines (all had to fight for it and were the subjects of other wars) but much of the rest of America’s overseas holdings came as a result of this little war: Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Guam are among the islands that came into US control—American Samoa sort of got caught up in the wake.  Though Spain was no longer a threat to the US and the Philippines wanted to be dependent of the US and not vassal to some other foreign power, the US sought to incorporate Hawai’i for strategic reasons, as the island was approximately midway between mainland America and its most remote holdings.